Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement

ISBN: 037575881X

Author: Meacham, Jon

Condition: New

An unprecedented portrait of the civil rights movement and the fight against white supremacy, told through voices that resonate with passion and strength-including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and John LewisJon Meacham . . . has done about the best job of anthologizing the movement that Ive ever seen.-Tom Wicker, Mother JonesEditor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham has chosen pieces by journalists, novelists, historians, and artists, bringing together a wide range of perspectives and experiences. The result is a literary anthology of important and artful interpretations of the movements spirit and struggle.Maya Angelou takes us on a poignant journey back to her childhood in the Arkansas of the 1930s. On the front page of The New York Times, James Reston marks the movements apex as he describes what it was like to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his heralded I Have a Dream speech in real time. Alice Walker takes up the movements progress a decade later in her article Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years After the March on Washington. And John Lewis chronicles the unimaginable courage of the ordinary African Americans who challenged the prevailing order, paid for it in blood and tears, and justly triumphed.Voices in Our Blood is a compelling look at the movement as it actually happened, from the days leading up to World War II to the anxieties and ambiguities of this new century. The story of race in America is a never-ending one, and Voices in Our Blood tells us how we got this far-and how far we still have to go to reach the Promised Land.This powerful anthology contains works from:Maya Angelou Russell Baker James Baldwin Taylor Branch Hodding Carter Ellis Cose Stanley Crouch Ralph Ellison William Faulkner Marshall Frady Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Peter Goldman David Halberstam Alex Haley Elizabeth Hardwick Charlayne Hunter-Gault Murray Kempton John Lewis Louis E. Lomax Benjamin E. Mays Willie Morris Flannery OConnor Walker Percy Howell Raines James Reston Carl T. Rowan John Steinbeck William Styron Calvin Trillin Alice Walker Robert Penn Warren Pat Watters Bernard Weinraub Eudora Welty Rebecca West E. B. White Gary Wills Tom Wolfe Richard Wright